Liberty Journal Summer 2012

Liberty Journal Summer 2012

New dean lays groundwork
for Liberty’s medical school
BY MITZI BIBLE
S
ince his first full day at Liberty
University in April, Dr. Ronnie
Martin has been hard at work
assembling a team of men and
women who will make history at Liberty
as they establish the new College of
Osteopathic Medicine.
Plans for the medical school were
announced last fall, when the Virginia
Tobacco Commission approved a $12
million grant for a school of osteopathic
medicine and an expanded health sciences
school, to be built on a portion of campus
in Campbell County.
Construction on a $40 million facility
is set to begin this summer and expected
to be completed in January 2014. The
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W W W. L I B E R T Y. E D U
105,000-square-foot building will be located
near where U.S. 29 and U.S. 460 meet, close to
Lynchburg Regional Airport. It will look down
over the intramural fields on Campus East.
“We’re going to have a top-notch
facility. When we get through, we will have
a facility that rivals any medical school in
the world,” said Martin.
Liberty’s medical school will become
the sixth to be established in the state.
Graduates will receive a D.O. (Doctor of
Osteopathic Medicine).
“We have a responsibility to train our
students so they are qualified to go into
any specialty they want to enter,” Martin
said. “We will try to influence them by
the design of our curriculum, and the
role models and mentors that we will
put in front of them, to go into what we
feel are the needed specialties for this
country: primary care and preventative
medicine, as well as ‘first point of contact’
specialties, such as general surgery or
emergency medicine.”
Martin came to Liberty from the Edward
Via College of Osteopathic Medicine
(VCOM) in Blacksburg, Va., where he
served as a professor, associate regional
dean, associate dean for Clinical Education,
and vice dean for Postgraduate Affairs.
Liberty has had a longstanding, supportive
relationship with VCOM and that will
continue, Martin said.
Martin was a practicing physician for
more than 20 years, serving as an emergency
room doctor, a family physician, and a
director of medical clinics.
Hiring Martin to lead the new venture
was one of the first steps in an accreditation
process that could take up to 36 months to
complete. Liberty is seeking accreditation
through the Commission on Osteopathic
College Accreditation and the Southern
Association of Colleges and Schools
Commission on Colleges.
Martin said if the accreditation moves
ahead on schedule and permission is
granted by the agencies, the school can
begin to recruit students in the fall of
2013, with plans to enroll 150 students
each year.
The establishment of a medical school
at Liberty comes at the right time, he said,
calling the need for health services and
physicians in the state, especially in the
Southside, “tremendous.”
He said 67 percent of the Health
Professional Shortage Areas (HPSA) of the
Southside region are underserved, “many
in crisis.” (Areas are considered HPSAs
when there is less than one physician for
every 3,500 patients).
“We know that physicians are more
likely to practice where they train, yet
Virginia has less than 40 percent of its
medical school graduates who remain in
the state,” he said.
The Virginia Department of Health has